


one day life will be kind

by vangoghstars



Series: we are not alive (seer!ranboo au) [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Angst, Blood and Gore, Dream Team SMP Spoilers, Injury, Lonely Ranboo (Video Blogging RPF), Other, Ranboo is a seer, Ranboo-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Sad Ranboo (Video Blogging RPF), Twitch Chat Appearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 00:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29481018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vangoghstars/pseuds/vangoghstars
Summary: Ranboo can see ghosts. It’s not something he enjoys, particularly.--4 times Ranboo doesn’t tell anyone he can see ghosts.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & Ranboo (Video Blogging RPF), Karl Jacobs & Ranboo, Ranboo & Technoblade & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Ranboo & Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit
Series: we are not alive (seer!ranboo au) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2173188
Comments: 25
Kudos: 790
Collections: Completed stories I've read, Ranboo Is Best Boi





	one day life will be kind

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome back to ranboo brainrot! as always, thank u for reading and i hope u very much enjoy! this one I wrote in a night bc i feel unwell and i don't want to do my homework. title is from the amazing song Home by AURORA. 
> 
> WARNING: this oneshot includes spoilers for both tales from the smp and dream smp up to the tales from the smp on February 14th.
> 
> if u want to come hang out with me on twitter i'm @izzyhangout !

Karl Jacobs is a strange man. He keeps weird hours, has two fiances heavily involved in conflict when he is not, and hangs out with King George and the server admin Dream. 

None of those are the reason Ranboo keeps away from him. 

Karl Jacobs is full of ghosts. 

Not all of them are kind. Some of them are: the young ginger child no taller than Karl’s shoulders trailed by a tall man in overalls, the bartender with the soft western accent. Most of them, the cannibal, the traitor wearing Ranboo’s face, the tall pink-haired man in a mask, are not. 

What they all are is loud. They stick to little groups and argue fiercely. Ranboo watches them and feels like he’s drowning, like he’ll never be free of the loud southern accented screeches and frantic whispers bouncing off of mansion walls. They don’t talk in any words he can understand, but the sounds are enough to hurt. 

“Hiya, Ranboo,” Karl says, bouncing around Ranboo to get to the wheat. Today he’s trailed by a shy looking woman in a blue dress. The front of it is doused in deep red blood that runs down her skirt. 

“H- hey,” he responds. The ghost smiles at him politely, curtseys even. He forces his gaze away from her and back towards Karl’s general direction. 

Karl tends to the wheat as the ghosts come and go. The same ones don’t often come twice, and the pretty girl with the blue dress is soon replaced by a short ginger man with a fish on his hat. That one doesn’t talk much, but he sends Ranboo an image of a chicken as Karl takes his leave. 

It is the first time Ranboo has ever been spoken to directly by a ghost, and it’s what draws him back to the wheat fields the next day. Most of Karl’s ghosts are loud and annoying and tend to keep to themselves. 

So Ranboo paces the field and he waits. He spends the morning like that, alternating between sitting in the grass and pacing around the wheat, wondering who is going to follow Karl today. 

When Karl appears, wheat seeds in hand and a basket for collecting the new growth in the other, Ranboo’s heart drops. 

This is one of the mean ones. He’s seen him before many times, the way his mask doesn’t quite obscure his blood red eyes. His arms and legs are covered in vines, terrifying dull red things that creep up everywhere and surround him. He is trailed by a tall and nervous-looking man with a green and red mask. He brandishes a sword also tied up in the vines, stuck to his hand indefinitely. 

Images flash in rapid succession in front of Ranboo’s eyes, all of them coming from the tall nervous man who feels so  _ fucking _ familiar. Fear comes with it too, and maybe worry. 

He sees first an egg.  _ The _ egg, but older and in a room of stone, tucked somewhere out of the way. It’s smaller but just as red, just as recognizable. He sees the pink-haired man throwing something scarily human-shaped into the egg. He sees blood and swords and  _ Karl Jacobs’ dead body on the floor _ . 

He reels back in shock, stumbles into the wheat and lands hard in the crops. Karl rushes towards him, and the ghosts stay behind. The one with pink hair leers menacingly while the other wrings his hands. 

“Ranboo?” Karl asks, offering out a hand. “Are you-?”

“They’re so loud,” Ranboo whispers. He doesn’t take Karl’s hands, so Karl reaches forward, holds onto a shoulder. Ranboo lets him. 

“What are?” Karl questions. There’s no judgement behind it, only concern. It’s not something Ranboo is used to. 

“The-” he pauses. He doesn’t know Karl. Who is Karl to care about some random child with memory issues? “Nothing.”

Karl sits down beside him at the edge of the wheat field. He fiddles with the strings of his hoodie and the fraying seams. 

“I actually- I wanted to talk to you,” Karl says. His face is tipped down. The ghosts stand over his shoulder menacingly. “You have memory issues, right?”

Ranboo nods silently. This conversation usually never ends well. 

“How- how do you deal with that?” Karl is crying now, fat tears running slowly down his cheeks. Ranboo lets his fingers tentatively brush Karl’s arm. Karl immediately drops his head onto Ranboo’s shoulder. 

“I’m forgetting everything,” Karl whispers. “I wake up and I can barely remember how I got there or what I was doing. And they keep telling me there’s a way to fix it, and there  _ has _ to be, because I’m starting to lose the bits of Quackity and Sapnap too- did you know I forget how I met Sapnap? What kind of  _ fucking _ fiance am I, Ranboo, I-” He dissolves into silent sobs. 

The pink-haired man whispers something to the tall plain clothed guy. An image flashes at Ranboo of a rapier in Karl’s chest, blood and vines seeping from the wound. 

“It’s okay, Karl,” Ranboo tells him softly. 

Karl looks up at him. Sir Billiam and his butler stand behind Karl, each one holding one of Karl’s shoulders. The vines from their arms snake down around Karl’s shoulders. 

Karl gives Ranboo a watery smile, but all Ranboo sees is vines, red as freshly spilled blood, seeping out of Karl Jacobs’ mouth. 

\--

Tubbo and Tommy both have one ghost each that flank them, which make them relatively easy to hang out with. 

The problem lies more with the fact that the ghosts deeply, deeply, hate each other. 

Tommy’s ghost is relatively recognizable because of the resident ghost of L’Manberg. Ranboo remembers being shocked at first that everyone else could see Ghostbur, but maybe that’s how it works when a city itself spawns a ghost. 

Tommy’s ghost is decisively not Ghostbur. He looks enough like Ghostbur, but this man is harder and harsher, face angular and thin. His brown hair is crushed under a beanie that matches the worn trench coat draped over his shoulder with a L’Manberg flag pin tacked on. There is a large gash running through his torso, the blood around it dried to the point of being blackened. 

This, Ranboo realizes, is the ghost of Wilbur Soot. 

WIlbur spends most of his time as a ghost sulking. If he notices Ranboo’s presence at all, he ignores it. The times when he’s not actively throwing the world’s worst version of the silent game, he’s busy making sure Tommy doesn’t fall off a cliff. 

Ranboo figures he would be pretty pissed too if he had to spend his afterlife making sure his younger brother figure didn’t accidentally die from stupidity. 

The only time Wilbur is really ever active, if one can count throwing an angry aura out around the room “active”, is around Tubbo. Ranboo reasons that has to do with Tubbo’s ghost. 

Tubbo’s ghost is completely unrecognizable. He’s only a little taller than Tubbo, with a crumpled suit and an undone red tie. Two tan horns sprout from curly brown hair that spills around his long furry ears. More often than not, he’s carrying a bottle and drinking heavily. 

Tubbo’s ghost and Wilbur fight constantly and over everything. They bicker through images to the point where it makes Ranboo’s head ache to watch photos of TNT and potions and snowballs and gold and iron and swords fly by. He has to bite his tongue to stop himself from telling them to shut up more times than he’d like to admit. 

Tubbo’s ghost does not seem to like Tubbo very much. He sneers at the kid almost every chance he gets, at the small horns peeking out between Tubbo’s brown locks. He sends lots of images of a L’Manberg flag on fire followed by a L’Manberg flag but black and orange. 

Ranboo tries to speak to him only once when Tubbo has his back turned. The ghost is taking a swig from his bottle, moping about and angrily projecting a large stone podium into Ranboo’s mind. 

“L’Manberg?” Ranboo whispers in his direction. The ghost lets out a high-pitched screech and vanishes on sight. 

“Huh?” Tommy asks, and Ranboo realizes he’s rounded the corner as Ranboo tried to talk to the ghost. Wilbur, who trails behind Tommy, perks up immediately at the mention of his old home. He sends Ranboo an image of the L’Manberg flag waving high in the sky near obsidian walls. 

Ranboo doesn’t really like obsidian walls. 

“Did you say L’Manberg?” Tommy continues. “What about it?”

Wilbur sends an image of a van with an on-fire hot dog on it. Ranboo chokes down a laugh. 

He contemplates, for a second, telling them. He wonders if he told them right now, if he sat Tommy and Tubbo down and spoke to them about the two adults that haunt them, if that would make him feel better or worse. He decides on the latter.

“I miss it,” Ranboo says instead. 

Tommy slings a hand over his shoulder. “Me too, big man.”

When Tubbo stumbles over the story of JSchlatt after Ghostbur’s failed resurrection, the ghost behind Tubbo cackles loudly. 

As Tubbo cries, the late president Schlatt laughs so hard that blood seeps from an unseen gash on his head and pools in his sideburns. 

\--

Dream’s ghosts are not physical entities, but that doesn’t make them anything less than the worst of the bunch. Perhaps it is why Ranboo avoids the prison for so long. 

Dream’s ghosts scream. 

They shriek shrilly and wildly until Ranboo’s ears ring with discomfort, until he can barely get works out because he can’t hear himself over all the noise. When he had met Dream, the day he had fallen into the server, he almost vomited at the sheer cacophony that hit him head on. 

He imagines that Dream’s ghosts are what death sounds like and understands why Ghostbur longs to get away from it so badly. 

The other thing about Dream’s ghosts is that they seem to absolutely hate Ranboo. When he watches Dream drop TNT onto L’Manberg, the black cloud that lingers behind the masked man screeches in his direction. They don’t often talk to him in pictures the way the others do, and for that Ranboo is glad. 

When Ranboo finds out he’s been possibly secretly doing Dream’s bidding, he wonders vaguely how he managed to circumvent the massive migraines from the ghosts. 

He goes to visit Dream for answers. He signs all the waivers he’s supposed to, cooperates with Sam the way he knows he should. It’s hard to read the words out loud when he can hear Dream’s ghosts screaming even from here. 

The lava does little to drown out the noise. The rush of the fire just adds onto the cacophony of sound coming from Dream. The warmth of Dream treating him like a friend feels strange under the eyes and accusations of the black mass hovering behind him. 

“You’re the one I talk to most on this server,” Dream says, and maybe, for a second, Ranboo believes him. Why would he lie? Dream is a man with nothing to lose. He’s never getting out of this prison. 

And what if Ranboo tells him? What then? If Dream is truly using Ranboo, if Ranboo is nothing more than a pawn in a universe-sized game of chess, why not just tell him? Maybe Dream knows where this began and where it could end. 

“Dream-” He begins. 

“You’re, like, my best friend,” Dream says. 

It’s wrong. It feels so suffocatingly wrong and hot and confined. It feels like fire burning directly on his skin and licking up around his ankles. He shuts his mouth tightly, and the voices grow in volume until his ears bend close to his face in an effort to keep them out.

The worst part is the way he can still here Dream’s laughs perfectly through the din, can still hear the moment Dream tells him he’s not even there and the world falls apart before his eyes. 

He wakes up in bed and cold, wondering if maybe he had made up the ghosts all along.

\--

Technoblade cannot see ghosts. 

Ranboo learns this rather slowly. It starts when he catches Techno talking to himself, staring into the fireplace and muttering something about “rainbowchat,” not that Ranboo has any idea what it means. Ranboo clears his throat to snap Techno out of it, who just sighs angrily and stomps off somewhere. 

It continues when Ranboo overhears Techno arguing loudly about trusting him. Ranboo’s clearly not meant to hear the conversation, but he’s come looking for Phil to get some help on moving a chest, and Phil has to be in there with Techno. Except Phil’s not. It’s just Techno’s voice through the door, huffing about how he doesn’t feel any sort of sentimentality about the axe Ranboo gave him last week. 

So, Ranboo decides to be rational and reason that Techno too can talk to ghosts. 

It ends when Ranboo catches Techno and Phil together. 

They both have a small cluster of ghosts behind them, faceless cloud-like things that don’t make much noise but whose messages flash around the two of them in written text. A ring of “E”s encircles Technos’ head, and a couple “Dadza”s sit by Phil’s left arm. Down at the bottom of Techno’s cape, a few text bubbles count steadily. Ranboo’s gaze follows the word “gapple gang” down Phil’s one non-damaged wing towards the floor. Techno’s eyes don’t follow it down. 

The “E”s by Techno get replaced fast with “Ranboo!” and “Ranboo pog!” and “Protect” when Ranboo shows up, and Techno immediately huffs and flicks an ear out. The ear passes right through one text bubble that reads “big brother techno pog.” 

“Ignore him,” Phil tells Ranboo as Techno lets out another huff. “It’s the voices.”

“The what?” Ranboo asks, eyes blown wide.  _ They’re like him, these two _ . 

“I can hear lots of voices,” Techno explains. “Sometimes they demand blood. Mostly they just spam weird things in my head.”

The words turn into a mix of “BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD” and “E”. 

“I can too,” Phil says. “But mine aren’t nearly as bloodthirsty. I call them ‘Chat’.” 

Chat explodes with a flurry of “hi ranboo”s and “dadza protect.” Ranboo decides Chat seems nice enough for a pack of ghosts that hangs out near his friend. 

Techno and Phil are probably the closest people Ranboo feels connected to in this world. Sure they can’t hear others’ ghosts the way Ranboo can, but they can hear their own ghosts, and maybe that can be good enough. Maybe that can be  ~~_ family _ ~~ . He shies away from the thought as quick as it comes. 

“Cool,” he says instead. “Good to know.”

His house feels cold that night. His own ghost, a tall man wearing an upside down smile mask and a black and white hoodie, tilts his head at Ranboo. 

“You couldn’t have told them anyway,” the ghost says in Dream’s voice. 

“Yeah,” Ranboo agrees, voice choked and wavered. “Nobody deserves to bear the weight of my nonsense as well.”

“You’re a burden,” the ghost echoes. He seems to be smiling under the mask. “It’s your fault they’re in danger, after all.” 

“Yeah,” Ranboo whispers. “My fault.”

The tears burn his cheeks as they slide down. 


End file.
